Flames

by Robert Hichens

CHAPTER X

THE DOCTOR DRIVES OUT WITH THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

Some days later Cuckoo received a telegram from Harley Street. It came in the morning, and ran as follows:

"Call here to-day if possible. Important. Levillier."

Cuckoo read it, trembling. In her early days telegrams came often to her door—"Meet me at Verrey's, four-thirty"; "Piccadilly Circus, five o'clock to-day." Such messages flickered through her youth, forming gradually a legend of her life. But this summons from the doctor at the same time frightened her and braced her heart. It might mean that Julian was ill, in danger—she knew not what. But at least it broke through the appalling inaction, the dreary stagnation, of her days. The lady of the feathers had fought indeed, of late, that worst enemy, mental despair, bred of grim patience at last grown weary. That was not the battle she had been inspired to expect, to prepare for. The doctor's telegram at least swept the unforeseen foe from the field, and seemed to set the real enemy full in view.

"There ain't any answer," the lady of the feathers said to Mrs. Brigg, who waited in an attitude expressive of greedy curiosity.

"Which of 'em is it?" demanded that functionary.

"Shan't tell you," Cuckoo hissed at her.

The filthy groove in which the landlady's mind forever ran began to rouse her to an intense animosity.

"Well, it's all one to me so long as I'm paid regular," muttered Mrs. Brigg, with a swing of her dusty skirts and a toss of her grey head, governed by pomade, since it was a Saturday. Mrs. Brigg must once have held Christian principles, as she always prepared the ground for certain Sabbath curls the day before.

Cuckoo ran to dress herself. It was seldom indeed that she stirred out in the morning, so seldom that that alone was an experience. Arrived in the bedroom, she pounced mechanically on rouge and powder, and was about to decorate herself when she suddenly paused with outstretched hands. She was going out into the bright wintry sunlight, and she was going to the doctor's house, full, perhaps, of those smart patients of whom Valentine had once spoken to her. What sort of an apparition would she be among them? She dropped her hands, hesitating. Then she turned to a cupboard, drew out the one famous black gown, and put it on. She crowned her head with Julian's hat, hid her hands in black silk gloves, pulled down her veil and seized an umbrella. Somehow Cuckoo vaguely connected respectability with umbrellas, although even the most vicious are fain to carry them in showery London. Then she looked at herself in the glass and wondered if her appearance were deceptive enough to trick the sharp eyes of the patients. The glance reassured her. She seemed to herself an epitome of black propriety, and she set forth with a more easy heart. As she walked, her mind ran on before, seeking what this summons meant and debating possibilities without arriving at conclusions. At the end of Harley Street her walk, which had been rapid, achieved a ritardando and nearly came to a full close before she gained the doctor's door. Cuckoo could be a brazen hussy. A year ago she could scarcely be anything else. But that love of hers for Julian had, it seemed, a strange power of undermining old habits. It laid hands upon so many perceptions, so many emotions, with which it should surely have had nothing to do, and made subtle inroads upon every dark corner of the girl's nature. From it came this ritardando. For Cuckoo was filled with a very human dread of exposing Doctor Levillier to misconception by her appearance in the midst of his patients. Had it been late afternoon instead of morning her fortitude would certainly have been greater, and might even have drawn near to impudence. But the clear light of approaching noontide set her mind blinking with rapid eyelids, and when she actually gained the street door her discomfort was acute.

As she put up her hand to touch the bell the door opened softly and a stout Duchess issued forth. Cuckoo didn't know she was a Duchess, but she quailed before the plethoric glance cast upon her, and her voice was uneven as she asked for the doctor.

"Have you an appointment, ma'am?" asked Lawler, who did not recognize her behind her black veil.

"I was asked to come," Cuckoo murmured.

"What name, ma'am?"

"Cuck—Miss Bright."

She was admitted. The doctor, in a hurry of business, had omitted to give Lawler any instructions in the event of Cuckoo's prompt response to his telegram. So she was shown into the waiting-room, in which three or four people were turning over illustrated papers with an air of watchful idleness and attentive leisure. Cuckoo sat down in a corner as quietly as possible, and Lawler vanished. The leaves of the illustrated papers rustled in the air with a dry sound. To Cuckoo they seemed to be crackling personal remarks about her, and to be impregnated with condemnation. She cast a furtive glance upon the square room and perceived that they were returned by four ladies, and that three of these ladies were looking straight at her. The eight eyes met in a glance of inquiry and were instantly cast down. Again the leaves of the illustrateds rustled, this time, Cuckoo felt convinced, more fiercely than before. The frou-frou of the skirts of one of the ladies joined in the chorus, which was far from crying "Hallelujah!" Cuckoo began to feel a growing certainty that, despite the black veil and the neat umbrella, feminine instinct had divined her. She was totally unaccustomed to such an atmosphere as that which prevailed in this room, and began to be the victim of an odd, prickly sensation, which she believed to be physical, but which was certainly more than half moral. A wave of heat ran over her body. It was like the heat which follows on a received slap. One of the illustrateds deleted its voice from the general chorus. Cuckoo was aware of this, and looked up again to find two eyes fixed upon her with an expression of thin distaste that was incapable of misinterpretation. A second illustrated ceased to sing, two heads were inclined towards one another, and the "t'p, t'p, t'p" of a low whisper set the remaining two ladies at their posts as sentinels on the lady of the feathers.

Cuckoo put her hand to her face to pull her veil a little lower down. By accident she tugged too hard, or it had been badly fastened to her hat, for one side got loose instantly and it fell down, revealing her face frankly.

The "t'p, t'p, t'p" sounded again, multiplied by two. Cuckoo, thrown into confusion by the malign behaviour of her veil, caught awkwardly at the dropped end with an intention of readjusting it, but something in the sound of the whispering suddenly moved her to a different action. She snatched the veil quite off, set her feet firmly against the thick Turkey carpet, raised her eyes and stared with all her might at the four ladies, hurling, as a man hurls a bomb, an expression of savage defiance into her gaze. The whispers stopped; a thin and repeated cough, dry as Sahara, attacked the silence, and eight eyes were vehemently cast down. Cuckoo continued staring, folding her hands in her lap. The prickly sensation increased, but she considered it now as a thing to be jumped on. Recognizing that she was recognized, she was instantly moved to play up to her part, and she longed to stare the four women out into Harley Street. If the energy of a gaze could have achieved that object, they must have backed through the doctor's plate glass into the area forthwith. They were, in fact, most obviously moved, and their attitudes expressed, by a community of lines, virtue rampant and agitation gules. A shattering silence endured till Lawler appeared to bid two of these virgins with lit lamps of self-righteousness to the consulting-room. As they rose the two other ladies rose also and followed in their wake. Lawler politely protested, but they were now to proclaim their beauty of character.

"We should prefer to wait in another room," said the lady who had coughed as a communication with heaven.

"Yes, another room," added the other, and as she spoke she half turned, indicating the corner where Cuckoo sat.

Without a word Lawler showed them out and closed the door. For another twenty minutes Cuckoo sat alone, glaring at the table by which these members of her sex had sat, and seeing no material objects but only—as is the way of humanity—her own point of view. The ladies saw only theirs. In this respect, at least, they closely resembled the lady of the feathers. When Lawler at length returned with his grave: "This way, if you please, ma'am," Cuckoo rose to her feet with the inflexibility of some iron thing set in motion by mechanism, and marched in his wake to the doctor's presence.

The doctor was standing up by a bright fire; he looked very grave.

"I am very sorry to have kept you," he said, "very sorry. I did not think you could get here so quickly."

Cuckoo cleared her throat.

"I wish I hadn't," she answered bluntly.

"Why?"

"It don't matter. I started directly your wire came."

"That was good of you. Please sit down."

Cuckoo sat with a straight back in the straightest chair she could perceive. The doctor still remained standing by the fire. He appeared to be thinking deeply. His eyes looked downward at his gaily shining boots. After a minute or two he said:

"I speak to you now in strict confidence, trusting your secrecy implicitly."

The back of Cuckoo became less straight. Even a gentle curve made it more gracious if less admirable from the dancing-mistress point of view.

"Honour!" she interjected rapidly, like a schoolboy.

The doctor looked up at her and a smile came to his lips. And as he looked up he noticed the neatness of her black gown, the simplicity of her hat, the absence of paint and powder. Being, after all, only a man, he was surprised at Cuckoo's appearance of propriety. The four ladies had been surprised at her appearance of impropriety. But the doctor, seeing her so much better than usual, thought her—in looks—quite well, as indeed she was in comparison with the tout ensemble of her usual days. He looked from her black gloves, which held the thick black veil, to the winter sunshine sparkling, like a dancing, eager child, at the window.

"Do you like driving?" he said.

"What?"

"Driving—do you like it?"

"Pretty well, if the horse don't come down," said Cuckoo, at once concentrated on cabs.

"My horses won't."

"Yours!"

"Yes. I have no more patients to-day. I have a half-holiday and I want to talk to you. Shall we go for a drive to Hampstead and talk out in the open air and the sunshine?"

The four ladies, the illustrateds, the cough, dry as Sahara, were instantly forgotten. Cuckoo became all curves, almost like Jessie in moments of supreme emotion.

"Me and you?" she exclaimed. "Oh yes!"

The doctor rang the bell.

"Take this lady to the dining-room and give her some lunch," he said to
Lawler. "And please order the victoria round at once."

"Yes, sir."

"While you lunch," he said to Cuckoo, "I'll just get through two letters that must be written, and then we'll start."

Cuckoo followed Lawler with a sense of airy wonder and delight.

A quarter of an hour later she was seated with the doctor in the victoria, the veil tightly stretched across her face, her poor mode of living up to his trust in her, and deserving the honour now conferred upon her. The coachman let his horses go, and Harley Street was left behind. Such a bright day it was. Even the cold seemed a gay and festive thing, spinning the circulation like a gold coin till it glittered, decorating the poorest cheeks with the brightest rose as if in honour of a festival. To Cuckoo London, as seen from a private carriage, was a wonder and a dream of novelty, a city of kings instead of a city of beggars, a city of crystal morning instead of a city of dreadful night. She gazed at it out of a new heart as these horses—that never came down—trotted briskly forward. Through the silk of her gloves her thumbs and fingers felt silently the warm sables of the rug that caressed her knees. And she thought that this feeling, and the feeling in her heart, must be constituent parts of the emotion called happiness. If the four ladies could see her now! If they could see her now, Cuckoo thought, she would take off her veil, just for a moment. When the aspect of the street began to change, when little gardens appeared, and bare trees standing bravely in the sun behind high walls and iron gates, the doctor said to Cuckoo:

"Now I will tell you why I telegraphed to you."

And then Cuckoo remembered that she was in this wonderful expedition for a reason. The doctor continued speaking in a low voice, with the obvious intention of being inaudible to the coachman, whose large furred back presented an appearance of broad indifference to their two lives.

"You remember what I said to you the other day—that perhaps you could help Julian from great evil."

Cuckoo nodded earnestly.

"And you are prepared to do anything you can?"

"Yes."

She had forgotten the smart carriage, and the horses that never came down, now.

"Good," said the doctor, shortly and decisively. "I will speak to you quite plainly to-day, for something leads me to trust you, and to say to you what I would say to no other person. Something leads me to believe that you can do more for Addison than any one else. Addison once implied it; but what I have observed for myself in your house leads me to be certain of it."

"Oh," said Cuckoo.

She had nothing more to say. She could have said nothing more. The stress of her excitement was too great.

"Look at that holly tree. What a quantity of berries it has!" the doctor said. "That's because it is a hard winter. Miss Bright, you are right in you conviction. Valentine Cresswell is—has been—totally evil, and is deliberately, coldly, but with determination, compassing the utter ruin of the man who trusts him and believes in him—of Addison."

Cuckoo nodded again, this time with a strangely matter-of-course air, which assured the doctor in a flash of the long certainty of her knowledge of Valentine.

"Such a thing seemed to me entirely incredible," the doctor pursued. "I am forced—forced—to believe it is true. But remember this: I have known Mr. Cresswell for several years intimately. I have been again and again with him and Julian. I have noticed the extraordinary influence he had over Julian, and I know that influence used to be a noble influence, used solely for good. Mr. Cresswell was a man of extraordinary high-mindedness and purity of life. He had a brilliant intellect," the doctor continued, forgetting to whom he was talking, as his mind went back to the Valentine of the old days. "But, far more than that, he was born with a very wonderful and unusual nature. It was written in his face in the grandeur—I can call it nothing else—of his expression. And it was written in his life, in all his acts. But, most of all it was written in all he did for Julian. Ah, you look surprised!"

Indeed Cuckoo's face, such of it as was visible under the black shadow of the veil, was a mask of blank wonderment. She looked upon the doctor as all that was clever and perfect and extraordinary; so this, it seemed to her, idiocy of his outlook upon Valentine was too much for her manner.

"Well, I never! Him!" she could not help ejaculating with a long breath, that was almost like a little puff.

"Remember," said Dr. Levillier, "this was before you knew him."

He had taken the trouble to ascertain from Julian the exact date of
Valentine's first introduction to the lady of the feathers.

"Oh yes," said Cuckoo, still with absolute incredulity of the truth of the doctor's panegyric expressed in voice and look.

"Men change greatly, terribly."

"Oh, not like that," she jerked out suddenly, moved by an irresistible impulse to contradict his apparent deduction.

"No, there you are right," he answered with emphasis. "Sane men do not, can never, I believe, change so utterly."

"That's what I say. I've seen men go down, lots of 'em, but it ain't like that."

Cuckoo spoke with some authority, as of one speaking from depths of a deep experience. She put her hands under the warm rug with a sensation of something that was like dignity of mind. She and the doctor were talking on equal terms of intellectuality just at this moment. She was saying sensible things and he was obliged to agree with her.

"Not like that," she murmured again out of the embrace of the rug.

He turned towards her so that he could see her more distinctly and make his words more impressive.

"Remember now that what I am going to say to you must not be mentioned to Julian on any account, or to any one," he said.

"I'll remember. Honour. I'll never tell."

"I have a very sad theory to explain this great change in Mr. Cresswell, from what he was as I knew him, and you must take his beauty of character from me—to what he is as you and I know him now. I believe that he has become mad." For the doctor had resolutely put away from his mind the fancies called up in it by the visit of Marr's wife.

Cuckoo gave a little cry of surprise, then hastily glanced at the coachman's back and pushed her hands under the rug up towards her mouth.

"Hush," said the doctor. "Only listen quietly."

"Yes, pardon," she said. "But he ain't—oh, he can't be."

"I am forced to think it, forced to think it," the doctor said, with pressure. "He has, in great measure, one of the most common, most universal, of the fatuous beliefs of the insane,—a deep-rooted, an almost incredible belief in himself, in his own glory, power, will, personality."

Cuckoo tried to throw in some remark here, but he went on without a pause:

"There are madmen confined in asylums all over England who think themselves the Messiah—this is the commonest form of religious mania—emperors, kings, regenerators of the human race, doers of great deeds that must bring them everlasting fame. On all other points they are sane, and you might spend hours alone with them and never discover the one crank in their mind that makes the whole mind out of joint. So you have been alone with Mr. Cresswell and have not suspected him. Yet he has a madness, and it is this madness which leads him to this frightful conduct of his towards Julian, conduct which you will never know the extent of."

Here Cuckoo succeeded in getting in a remark:

"Will," she said, catching hold of that one word and beginning to look eager. "That's what he was at all the time he was talking to me that night. Will, he says, is this and that and the other; will, he says, is everythin', I remember. Will, he says, is my God, or somethin' like it. He did. He did."

"Ah! you see; even you have noticed it."

"Yes; but he ain't mad, though," Cuckoo concluded, with an echo of that obstinacy which she could never completely conquer. She said what she felt. She could not help it. The doctor was in no wise offended by this unskilled opinion opposed to his skilled one. He even smiled slightly.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

"He's too sharp. He's a sight too sharp."

"Madmen are very cunning."

"So are women," Cuckoo exclaimed. "I could see if a man was mad."

She was a little intoxicated with the swift motion, the bright sun, the keen air, the clang of the horse's hoofs on the hard roads, and, most of all, with this conference which the befurred coachman was on no account to hear. This made her hold fast to her opinion, with no thought of being rude or presuming. The doctor, accustomed to have duchesses and others hanging upon his words of wisdom, was whipped into a refreshed humour by this odd attitude of an ignorant girl, and he replied with extreme vivacity:

"You will think as I do one day. Meanwhile listen to me. When Mr. Cresswell came to you and broke out into this tirade, which you say you remember, on the subject of will, did he not show any excitement?"

"Eh?"

"Did he get excited, very hot and eager? Did he speak unusually loud, or make any curious gestures with his hands? Did he do anything, that you can remember, such as an ordinary man would not do?"

"Why, yes," Cuckoo answered. "So he did."

"Ah! What was it? What did he do?"

"Well, after he'd been talkin' a bit he caught hold of me and pulled me in front of the glass. See?"

"Yes, yes."

"And he made me look into it."

"What for?"

But at this point Cuckoo got restive.

"I—I can't remember," she murmured, almost sullenly, recalling
Valentine's bitter sarcasms on her appearance and way of life.

"Never mind, then. Leave that. But after; what came next?"

"While we was standin' like that he seemed to get frightened or somethin', like he saw somethin' in the glass. He was frightened, scared, and he hit out all on a sudden, just where my face was in the glass, and smashed it."

"Smashed the glass?"

"Yes. And then he snatched hold of me and looked in my eyes awful queer, and then he burst out laughin' and says as the mirror was tellin' him lies. That's all."

"He was perfectly sober?"

"Oh, he hadn't been on the booze."

"Sober and did that, and then you can tell me that there is no madness in him."

The doctor spoke almost in a bantering tone, but Cuckoo stuck to her guns.

"I don't think it," she said, with her under lip sticking out.

"Well, Miss Bright, I want you to assume something."

"What's that?"

"To pretend to yourself that you think something, whether you do really think it or not."

"Make believe!" cried Cuckoo, childishly.

"Exactly."

"What about?"

"I want you to 'make believe' that Mr. Cresswell is not himself—is not sane."

"O-oh-h!" said Cuckoo, with a long intonation of surprise.

"I do honestly believe it; you are to pretend to believe it. Now, remember that."

"All right."

"You are not to contradict any more, you see."

"Oh," began Cuckoo, in sudden distress. "Pardon. I didn't—"

"Hush! That's all right. Act with me on the make-believe or assumption that Mr. Cresswell is not himself at present."

"Ah, but that ain't no make-believe. He told me as he wasn't himself when he says, 'I am Marr.'"

"Yes—yes," said the doctor. Secretly, almost angrily, he said to himself that Valentine, in some access of insanity, had actually confessed to the lady of the feathers that he knew himself to be mad.

"He says he ain't himself," she repeated again, with an eager feeling that perhaps, at last, she had got at the right interpretation of the gospel of Valentine.

"That is practically the same thing as his saying to you that he was mad.
Now you have told me what you feel for Julian."

Cuckoo flushed, and muttered something unintelligible, twining her hands in the sables till she nearly pulled them from Doctor Levillier's knees.

"And you have seen the terrible change that has come over him, and that is fast, fast deepening to something that must end in utter ruin. You have not seen him these last few days, I think."

"No", said Cuckoo, her eyes fixed hungrily on the doctor's face. She began to tug at her veil. "What's it? Is he—is he?"

She collapsed into a nervous silence, still tugging with a futile hand at the veil, which remained implacably stretched across her face. The doctor looked at her, and said steadily:

"He has gone a little further—down. You understand me?"

"I ought to," she said, bitterly.

"As you are mounting upward," the doctor rejoined, with a kind and firm gravity that seemed indeed to lift Cuckoo, as a sweet wind lifts a feather and sends it on high.

The bitterness went out of her face, but she said nothing, only sat listening attentively while the doctor went on:

"My belief is this, and if you hold it you can perhaps act in this matter with more boldness, more fearlessness, than if you do not hold it. I believe that Mr. Cresswell, who played very foolish tricks with his nerves some time ago, just before he got to know you, has become mad to this extent, that he believes himself to have a power of will unlike that possessed by any other man,—an inhuman power, in fact. He fancies that he has the will of a sort of god, and he wishes to prove this to himself more especially. Everything is for self in a madman. Now he looks about for a means of proving that his will can do everything. He wants to make it do something extraordinary, uncommon. What does he find for it to do? This, the ruin of Julian. And now I'll tell you why this ruin of Julian would be a peculiar triumph for his will. Originally, when Cresswell was sane and splendid, his splendour of sanity guarded Julian from all that was dangerous. Julian was naturally inclined to be wild. He has an ardent nature, and five years ago, when he was a mere boy, might have fallen into a thousand follies. Cresswell's influence first kept him from these follies, and at last taught him to loathe and despise them. And Julian, remember this, told Cresswell at last that he had been to him a sort of saviour. You can follow me?"

"'M," Cuckoo ejaculated with shut mouth and a nod of her head.

"So that Cresswell knew what his will had been able to do in the direction of lifting Julian high up, almost above his nature. Well, then followed certain foolish practices which I need not describe. Cresswell and Julian joined in a certain trickery, often practised by people who call themselves spiritualists and occultists. It certainly had an effect upon them at the time, and I advised them earnestly to drop it. They disregarded my advice, and the result was that Mr. Cresswell fell into an extraordinary condition of body. He fell into a trance, became as if he were dead, and remained so for some hours on a certain night. I was called in to him, and actually thought that he was dead. But he revived. Now, I believe that though he seemed to recover, and did recover in body, he never recovered from that insensibility in mind. I believe he went into that sleep sane and came out of it mad, and that he remains mad to this moment. Certainly, ever since then he has been an altered man, the man you know, not at all the man he used to be. Since that night he, who used to be almost unconscious of the wonder of his own will, has become intensely self-conscious, and engrossed with it, and has wished to make it obey him and perform miracles. And what is the special miracle to which he is devoting himself at this moment, as you have observed? Just this: the ruin of the thing he originally saved. It is like this," he said, noting that Cuckoo was becoming puzzled and confused, "Cresswell, by his influence, made Julian loathe sin. Coming out of this trance, as I believe, a madman, he seeks to make his will do something extraordinary. What shall he make it do? His eyes fall on Julian, who is always with him, as you know. And he resolves to make Julian love what he has taught him to loathe—sin, vice, degradation of every kind. So he sets to work with all the cunning of a diseased mind, and hour by hour, day by day, he works for this horrible end. At first he is quiet and careful. But at last he becomes almost intoxicated as he sees his own success. And he allows himself to be led into outbreaks of triumph. One of those outbreaks you yourself seem to have witnessed. I have witnessed another—on the night I dined alone with Cresswell, when he killed the dog, Rip, and threw him out into the snow. Cresswell is intoxicated with the mental intoxication of mania, at the degradation into which his will has forced Julian, who had learnt to love him, to think that everything he did must be right. And this intoxication is leading him to excesses. It is my firm belief that he intends to drag Julian down into intolerable abysses of sin, to plunge him into utter ruin, to bring him perhaps to prison, and to death."

Cuckoo was listening now with a white face—even her lips looked almost grey. The sunshine still lay over the winter world. The horses trotted. The sables were warm about her. They had nearly left the city behind them and were gaining the heights, on which the air was keener and more life-giving, and from which the outlook was larger and more inspiring. But the girl's gaiety and almost wild sense of vivacity and protectedness had vanished. For the doctor's face and voice had become grave, and his words were weighty with a conviction, which, added to her own knowledge of Julian and Valentine, made her fears unutterable. As the doctor paused she opened her lips as if to speak, but she said nothing. He could not but perceive the cloud that had settled on her, and his manner quickly changed. A brightness, a hopefulness, illumined his face, and he said quickly:

"This tragedy is what you and I, but you especially, must prevent."

Then Cuckoo spoke at last:

"How ever?" she said.

"Remember this," he answered. "If Cresswell is mad we must pity him, not condemn him. But we must, above all, fight him. Could I prove his madness the danger would be averted? Possibly time will give me the means of proving it. I have watched him. I shall continue to watch him. But as yet, although I see enough to convince me of his insanity, I don't see enough to convince the world, or, above all, to convince Julian. Therefore never give Julian the slightest hint of what I have told you of to-day. His adoration of Valentine is such that even a hint might easily lead him to regard both you and me as his enemies. Keep your own counsel and mine, but act with me on the silent assumption that Cresswell being a madman, we are justified in fighting him to the bitter end, you and I, with all our forces."

"I see," Cuckoo said, a burning excitement beginning to wake in her.

"Justified in fighting him, but not in hating him."

"Oh," she said, with a much more doubtful accent.

"Scarcely any human being, if indeed any, is completely hateful. How then can a human being, whose mind is ill and out of control, be hateful?" said the doctor, gently.

She felt herself rebuked, and a quick thought of herself, of what she was, rebuked her too.

"I'll try not," she murmured, but with no inward conviction of success.

They were on the heath now, and the smoke of London hung in the wintry air beyond and below them. The sun was already beginning to wear the aspect of a traveller on the point of departure for a journey. His once golden face was sinister with that blood-red hue which it so often assumes on winter afternoons, and which seems to set it in a place more than usually remote, more than usually distant from our world, and in a clime that is sad and strange. Winds danced over the heath like young witches. The horses, whipped by the more intense cold, pulled hard against the bit, and made the coachman's arms ache. The doctor looked away for a moment at the vapours that began to clothe the afternoon in the hollows and depressions of the landscape, and at the sun, whose gathering change of aspect smote on his imagination as something akin to the change that falls over the faces of men towards that hour when the sun of their glory makes ready for its setting. Still keeping his glance on that sad red sun in its nest of radiating vapours, he said, in a withdrawn voice:

"We must hate nothing except the hatefulness of sin in ourselves and in others."

Cuckoo listened as to the voice of some one on a throne, and tears that she could not fully understand rose in her eyes.

But now the doctor turned from the sun to the lady of the feathers, and there was a bright light in his quiet eyes.

"You and I must fight with all our forces," he said. "Have you ever thought about this thing will which Cresswell worships insanely? Have you ever felt it in you, Miss Bright?"

"I don't know as I have," Cuckoo said, secretly wondering if it were that strange and fleeting power which had come to her of late, which had made her for a moment fearless of Valentine as she defied him in the loneliness of her room, which had stirred her even to a faith in herself when she spoke with the doctor under the stars upon her doorstep.

"I think you have. I think you will. It must be there, for Julian feels it in you. He—he calls it a flame."

"Eh? A flame?"

"Yes. He sees it in your eyes, and it holds him near you."

So the doctor spoke, partly out of his conviction, partly because he had definitely resolved to put away from him all the things that fought against his reason and that his imagination perhaps loved too much. Such things, he thought, floated like clouds across the clearness of his vision, and drowned the light of his power to do good. So his fancies that had fastened on the mystery of the dead Marr and the living Valentine, connecting them together, and weaving a veil of magic about their strange connection, were banished. He would not hold more commerce with them, nor would he accept the fancies of others as realities. Thus, in his mind, Julian's legend of the flame in this girl's eyes, despite the doctor's own vision of flames, became merely a story of the truth of human will and an acknowledgment of its power.

"Is that why he looks at me so?" Cuckoo asked, in a manner unusually meditative. "But then he, Valentine, did the same! Why, could that be what scared him that night—what he struck at?"

"He too may feel that you have a power for good, to fight against his power for evil. Yes, he does feel it. Make him feel it more. Rely on yourself. Trust that there's something great within you, something placed there for you to use. Never mind what your life has been. Never mind your own weakness. You are the home, the temple, of this power of will. Julian feels it, and it draws him to you, but it is as nothing yet compared with the power of Cresswell. You have to make it more powerful, so that you may win Julian back from this danger."

"Eh? How?"

"Rest on it; trust in it; teach it to act. Show Julian more and more that you have it. Can't you think of a way of showing that you have this power?"

"Not I. No," Cuckoo murmured.

The doctor lowered his voice still more. Quite at a venture he drew a bow, and with his first arrow smote the lady of the feathers to the heart.

"Has Julian ever asked you to do anything?" he said.

Suddenly Cuckoo's face was scarlet.

"Why? How d' you know?" she stammered.

"Anything for him that was not evil?" the doctor pursued, following out an abstract theory, not as Cuckoo fancied, dealing with known facts. "I know nothing. I only ask you to try and remember, to search your mind."

There was no need for the lady of the feathers to do that.

"Yes, he did once," she said, looking still confused and furtive.

"Was it difficult?"

She hesitated.

"I s'pose so," she answered at last.

"Did you do it?"

"No."

The doctor had noticed that his questions gave pain.

"I don't want to know what it was and I don't ask," he said. "I have neither the right to, nor the desire to. But can't you do it, and show Julian that you have done it? If you do I think he will see that flame, which he fears and which fascinates him, burn more clearly, more steadily, in your eyes."

"I'll see," Cuckoo said with a kind of gulp.

"Do more than this. This is only a part, one weapon in the fight. Cresswell is always near Julian; you must be near him. Cresswell pursues Julian; you must pursue him, use your woman's wit, use all your experience of men; use your heart. Wake up and throw yourself into this battle, and make yourself worthy of fighting. Only you can tell how. But this is a fact. Our wills, our powers of doing things, are made strong, or made weak by our own lives. Each time we do a degradingly low, beastly thing"—he chose the words most easily comprehended by such a woman as she was—"we weaken our will, and make it less able to do anything good for another. If you commit loveless actions from to-day—though Julian has nothing to do with them—with each loveless action you will lose a point in the battle against the madness of Cresswell. And you must lose no points. Remember you are fighting a madman, as I believe, for the safety of the man you love. If I could tell you what—"

The doctor pulled himself up short.

"No," he said, "no need to tell you more than that, within these last few days I have found that all you said about Cresswell's present diablerie"—he shook his head impatiently at the language he was using to the lady of the feathers—"Cresswell's present impulse for evil is less horribly true than the truth. I shall watch him, day by day, from now. And if I can act, I shall do so. If his insanity is too sharp for me, as it may well be, I shall be checkmated in any effort to forcibly keep him from doing harm. In that case I can only trust to you, and hope that some chance circumstance may lead to the opening of Julian's eyes. But they are closed—closed fast. In any case you will help me and I will help you. You shall have opportunities of meeting Julian often. I will arrange that. And Cresswell—"

He paused as if in deep thought.

"How to do it," he murmured, almost to himself. "How to bring this battle to the issue!"

Then he turned his eyes on Cuckoo.

She was sitting bolt upright in the carriage. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hollow eyes were sparkling. She had drawn her hands out from under the rug and clasped them together in her lap.

"Oh, I'll do anything I can," she said, "anything. And—and I can do that one thing!"

"Yes," said the doctor. "Which?"

"The thing that he asked me once, and what I said no to," she answered, but in such a low murmur that the doctor scarcely caught the words.

He leaned forward in the carriage.

"Home now, Grant," he said to the coachman. "Or—no—drive first to 400
Marylebone Road."

The doctor turned again towards Cuckoo. She was looking away from him, so much that he was obliged to believe that she wished to conceal her face, which was towards the sunset.

The sky over London glowed with a dull red like a furnace. It deepened, while they looked, passing rapidly through the biting cold of the late winter afternoon.

The red cloud near the fainting sun broke and parted.

Spears of gold were thrust forth.

"Flames," the doctor whispered to himself. "Flames! The will, the soul of
God in nature."

PART V—FLAMES

CHAPTER I

VALENTINE INVITES HIS GUESTS

Valentine and Julian sat together in the tentroom at night, as they sat together many months ago, when Julian confessed his secret and Valentine expressed his strange desire to have a different soul. Now it was deep winter. The year was old. In three days it must die. It lay in the snow, like some abandoned beggar waiting for the inevitable end. Some, who were happy, would fain have succoured it and kept it with them. Others, who were sad, said: "Let it go—this beggar. Already it has taken too many alms from us." But neither the happy nor the sad could affect its fate. So it lay in the snow and in the wind, upon its deathbed.

The tentroom had not been altered. Still the green draperies, veiled walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling. The fire danced and shone. The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness. Only Rip was gone from the broad and cushioned divan upon which he had loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and Julian listened or replied. The room was the same, and this very fact emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it. They leaned in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to time in cigarette-smoke. No sound of London reached them in this small room. Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain. Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul. The face of Julian was drawn and heavy. His eyes were downcast. His arms hung over the cushioned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued. From time to time he opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if he ground them together. The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth. The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the steps of evening on an autumn day—grey, as if it clothed processes of decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the creaking threshold of premature age.

The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye. There was still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in his features. The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were the lips of Julian. The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease. Yet he, too, was changed. Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, asserted itself. It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pass in a fleeting gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed immobility of a mask. Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness. Valentine's was a hard and shameless face, although his features, if coarser than of old, were still noble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.

He was looking across at Julian, who held idly between his lax fingers a letter written with violet ink upon pink paper, which had a little bird stamped in the left-hand corner.

"When did you get it?" he said.

"Two or three days ago, I think. I can't remember. I can't remember anything now," Julian answered heavily.

"And you have had two since?"

"Yes. And to-day she called."

"You were out?"

"Yes."

"She shows herself very exigent all of a sudden. She is afraid of losing you. I told you long ago she cherished absurd ambitions with regard to you. Do you intend to answer her notes?"

"Oh yes," Julian said. "Cuckoo has always been very fond of me; very fond."

He glanced at the absurdly vulgar little bird in the corner of the letter. "And that's something," he added slowly.

"You are weighed down with gratitude? No wonder. Are you grateful to others who have always cared for you in a different way—unselfishly, that is?"

"I don't seem to feel very much about anybody now," Julian said. "I do such a lot. The more you do, the less you feel. Damnable life! All cruelty. I can't feel satisfied. But there must be something; something I haven't tried. I must find it," he said, almost fiercely, and, stirring in a sudden energy, "I must find it—or—curse you, Val, why don't you find it for me?"

Valentine laughed.

"The last novelty has failed? You are a very discontented sinner, Julian.
And yet London begins to think you too enterprising. I hear that Lady
Crichton is the last person to shut her doors against you. What did she
hear of?"

"How should I know?"

He laughed bitterly.

"She oughtn't to be particular. She used to receive Marr. I met him first in her yellow drawing-room."

"London had not discussed him, perhaps. You are rapidly becoming a legend and a warning. That is fame. To be the accepted warning for others."

"Or infamy; which is much the same thing."

"But you are only at the first posting-station of your journey," Valentine continued, looking at him with a smile. "If you are dissatisfied, it is because you have not tasted yet half that strength of the spring we once talked of. You have not completely thrown off the foolish yoke of public opinion. The chains still jangle about you. Cast them away and you will yet be happy."

"Shall I? Shall I, Valentine?"

The exhausted, worn, and weary figure leaned abruptly forward in its chair. Julian's tired eyes glittered greedily.

"To be happy, I'd commit any crime," he said.

"Crime is merely opinion," Valentine answered. "Everything is opinion.
You will commit crimes probably. Most brave men do."

"But shall I be happy?"

"You are greedy, Julian, greedy of everything, knowledge of life, lust, joy. You are never satisfied. That's because you and I fasted for so long; and the greedy man is never quite happy while he is eating, for he is always anticipating the next course. And, let philosophers say what they will, happiness does not lie in anticipation. Go on eating. Pass on from course to course. At last there will come a time, a beautiful time, when your appetite will be satisfied and you will rest contented. But, remember, not till you have journeyed through the whole menu, played with your dessert and even drunk your black coffee. Go on, only go on. Men and women are unhappy. They think it is because they have done too much. They reproach themselves for a thousand things that they have done. Fools! They are unhappy because they have not done enough. The text which will haunt me on my deathbed will be: 'I have left undone those things which I ought to have done.' Yes, during my long cursed years of inaction, when I was called the Saint of Victoria Street. Ah! Julian, you and I slept; we are awake now. You and I were dead; we are now alive. But we are only at the beginning of our lives. We have those years, those white and empty years, to drown in the waters of Lethe. They are like monstrous children that should have been strangled almost ere they were born, white, vacant children. And now, day by day, we are pressing them down in the waters with our hands. At last they will sink. The waves will flow over their haggard faces. The waves will sweep them away. Then we shall be happy. We shall redeem those years on which the locust fed, and we shall be happy."

"Yes, by God, we shall be happy, we will—we will be happy. Only teach me to be happy, Valentine, anywhere, anyhow."

"Not with the lady of the feathers. She will not make you happy."

"Cuckoo? No! For she's terribly unhappy herself. Poor old Cuckoo. I wonder what she's doing now."

"Searching in the snow for her fate," Valentine said, with a sneer.

* * * * *

It was not so. Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible. And the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows and night-fellows.

* * * * *

"I am going to write to Cuckoo," Julian said a day later. "What shall I say?"

Valentine hesitated.

"What have you thought of saying?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. First one thing, then another. Good-bye among the number. That's what you wish me to say, Val, isn't it?"

He spoke in a listless voice, monotonous in inflection and lifeless in timbre. The dominion of Valentine over him since the supper at the Savoy had increased, consolidating itself into an undoubted tyranny, which Julian accepted, carelessly, thoughtlessly, a prey to the internal degradation of his mind. Once he had only been nobly susceptible, a fine power. Now he was drearily weak, an ungracious disability. But with his weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the indifference peculiar to the autocrat. Valentine recognized in the voice the badge of serfdom, even more than in the question, and he smiled with a cold triumph. He had intended telling Julian now, once for all, to break with the lady of the feathers, of whom even yet he stood in vague fear. But the question, the voice of Julian, gave him pause, slid into his soul a new and bizarre desire, child of the strange intoxication of power which was beginning to grip him, and which the doctor had remarked. If Julian broke with Cuckoo, repulsed her forever into the long street that was her pent and degraded world, would not the sharp salt of Valentine's triumph be taken from him? Would not the wheels of his Juggernaut car fail to do their office in his sight—there was the point!—upon a precious victim? The lady of the feathers thus deliberately abandoned by Julian would suffer perhaps almost to the limit of her capability of pain, but Valentine would have lost sight of her in the dark, and though he would have conquered that spectral opposition which she had whimsically offered to him—he laughed to himself now, thinking of his fear of it—he would not see that greatest vision, the flight of his enemy. These thoughts flashed through his mind, moving him to an answer that astonished Julian.

"Good-bye!" he said. "Why should I wish that?"

"You said the other day at the Savoy that she hated you; that you and she must have a battle unless I chose between you."

"I was laughing."

The lifelessness left Julian's voice as he exclaimed:

"Valentine! But you were—"

"Sober, and you were not. Can you deny it?"

Julian was silent.

"I so little meant that nonsense," Valentine continued, "that I have conceived a plan. To-morrow is the last night of the old year. The doctor asked us to spend it with him. We refused. Providence directed that refusal, for now we are at liberty to celebrate the proper occasion for burying hatchets by burying our particular hatchet. The lady of the feathers, your friend, my enemy, shall see the new year in here, in this tentroom, where long ago we—you and I—with how ill success, sought to exchange our souls."

Julian looked utterly astonished at this proposition.

"Cuckoo wouldn't come here," he began.

"So you said once before. But she came then, and she will come now."

"And then the doctor! If he gets to hear of it! We said we were dining out."

Valentine's hard smile grew yet harder, and his eyes sparkled eagerly.

"I'll arrange that," he said. "The doctor shall come here too."

It seemed indeed as if he meant that his triumph should culminate on this final night of the year, his year. He laughed Julian's astonishment at this vagary aside, sat down and wrote the two notes of invitation, and then went out with Julian, saying:

"Julian, come out with me. You remember what I said about the greedy man? Come; Fate shall present you with another course, one more step towards your café noir and—happiness. Voilà!"

Valentine was right in his supposition that both the lady of the feathers and the doctor would accept his invitation, but he did not understand the precise motive which prompted their acceptance. Nor did he much care to understand it. Cuckoo, Doctor Levillier! After all, what were they to him now? Spectators of his triumph. Interesting, therefore, to a certain extent, as an unpaying audience may be interesting to an actor. Interesting, inasmuch as they could contribute to swell the bladder of his vanity, and follow in procession behind his chariot wheels. But he no longer cared to divine the shades of their emotions, or to busy himself in fathoming their exact mental attitudes in relation to himself. So he thought, touched perhaps with a certain delirium, though not with the delirium of insanity attributed to him by Doctor Levillier.

The doctor had intended celebrating the last night of the year in Harley Street with Cuckoo and the two young men. The refusal of the latter put an end to the opening of his plan of campaign in this strange battle, and he was greatly astonished when he received Valentine's invitation. Still, he had no hesitation in accepting it.

"So," he said to himself, as he read the note, "we join issue within the very wall of the enemy. Poor, deluded, twisted Valentine! that I should have to call him, to think of him as an enemy! We begin the fight within the shadow of our opponent's tent."

Literally that was the fact.

Cuckoo's thoughts were less definite, more tinged with passion, less shaped by the hands of intellect. They were as clouds, looming large, yet misty, hanging loose in torn fragments now, and now merging into indistinguishable fog that yet seemed pregnant with possibilities. Poor thoughts, vague thoughts; yet they pressed upon her brain until her tired head ached. And they stole down to her heart, and that ached too, and hoped and then despaired—then hoped again.